I would like the ability to perform a “natural sort” that ignores leading articles (a, an, the). (I would like grouping to use the same logic.) The use case is that I have a database of books, and I would like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, for example, to appear in the A’s rather than the T’s. In Google Sheets I achieve this by creating a dedicated sort column with a function: REGEXREPLACE($B2, "^(A|An|The) ", "").
There’s been no official answer to this topic (obviously), and no new feature yet that I know of. In the meantime, I’ve been sorting by a hidden formula field. Here’s an example formula from a book database including book series and title:
SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE({Series} & {Title}, "A ", ""), "An ", ""), "The ", ""), '"', "")
As you can see, it concatenates the series name and title and just deletes "A ", "An ", and "The " wherever it finds them.
